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Public hospitals are looking to attract a different class of patients — somewhat higher-income, more educated and more stable — to a system whose historic mission has been to serve the poor, and whose finances have been straining...

For Travis Hill, it was an offer too good to refuse. Last year when the 30-year-old neuroscientist was admitted to a new program at the NYU School of Medicine that would allow him to complete medical school in only three years and guarantee him a spot in its neurosurgery residency, he seized it. Not only would Hill save about $70,000, he would also shave a year off the training that will consume the next decade of his life...

Using equations that incorporate height, weight, age, and sex to predict heart mass may better allocate donor hearts to transplant recipients than considering body mass alone, a retrospective study suggested. Although differences in body mass were not predictive of survival after heart transplantation, differences in predicted heart mass using those equations were related to survival up to 5 years after the operation...

Paul D. Donahue and his wife, Angela, are among more than a million Americans who have signed up for health coverage through the federal insurance exchange. Donahue has a card in his wallet from his insurer to prove it. But when he tried to use it to get a flu shot and fill prescriptions, local pharmacies could not confirm his coverage, so he left without his medications. Similar problems are occurring elsewhere...

When Dr. Pedro del Nido operates on an infant’s or small child’s heart, he closes the surgical cuts the old-fashioned way: with needle and thread. As tried and true as it is, sewing a patch onto a child’s heart is difficult and risky. Frustrated by these limitations, del Nido, head of the cardiac surgery department at Boston Children’s Hospital, and medical researchers in Boston have come up with a replacement: glue...

New data released by National Nurses United revealed that not only do a handful of hospitals charge patients more than 10 times the actual cost of treatment but that prices have been steadily increasing for nearly two decades. Skimping on care, patients often pay for it with their health, said Joan Ross, co-president of National Nurses United...

A new study has found that people enrolled recently in Medicaid went to the emergency room 40 percent more frequently than others, often seeking help for conditions that could be treated less expensively in a doctor's office or an urgent care clinic...

When a 20-year-old man got over the pain of having his burst appendix removed in October, he got hit with a hospital bill he wasn't expecting. The bill from Sutter General Hospital in Sacramento, Calif., said the total charges were $55,029.31 but that the patient owed only $11,119.23 because his insurance had covered the rest. Shocked, the patient took to Reddit to post the bill and vent his frustrations...

After a rush of 11th-hour interest, 230,624 people had enrolled in either private or public insurance through New York State’s health insurance exchange by the Dec. 24 deadline, qualifying them for coverage on the first day of the new year, state officials said on Monday...

The technique, called morcellation, is characterized by a surgeon shredding tissue, usually fibroids or the uterus, during a laprascopic hysterectomy that is then usually removed through a small incision in the abdomen...

Mortality following bariatric surgery isn't as high as previously reported, an updated meta-analysis has concluded. Bariatric surgery was associated with a 30-day mortality rate of 0.08 percent (95% CI 0.01%-0.24%), down from the 0.3 percent risk as reported in previous research...

A Florida hospital announced Tuesday that a 3-year-old patient had survived a five-organ transplant, but it might not be five organs -- the number depends on how they're counted. Adonis Ortiz underwent the multiple organ transplant surgery in October, and Jackson Memorial Hospital held a news conference this week to proclaim the operation a success...

A worker operating a machine in a family workshop in China accidentally cut off his hand -- which doctors were able to save by grafting it onto his lower calf. The worker, Xie Wei, said he was initially unsure if his right hand could be saved, but he thought it was worth a try. The hand went without a blood supply for many hours while Xie searched for a hospital that could perform such a surgery...

The Obama administration said Saturday that it had reduced the error rate in enrollment data sent to insurance companies under the new healthcare law, even as insurers said that the government’s records were still riddled with mistakes...